Latin American Folktales Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PROLOGUE - EARLY COLONIAL LEGENDS

  PREFACE

  INTRODUCTION

  1. Montezuma

  I. THE TALKING STONE

  II. MONTEZUMA’S WOUND

  III. EIGHT OMENS

  IV. THE RETURN OF QUETZALCOATL

  V. IS IT YOU?

  2. Legends of the Inca Kings

  I. MAYTA CAPAC

  II. THE STORM

  III. THE VANISHING BRIDE

  IV. A MESSENGER IN BLACK

  V. THE ORACLE AT HUAMACHUCO

  3. Bringing Out the Holy Word

  FOLKTALES - A TWENTIETH-CENTURY WAKE

  PART ONE

  4. In the City of Benjamin

  5. Antuco’s Luck

  6. Don Dinero and Doña Fortuna

  7. Mistress Lucía

  8. St. Peter’s Wishes

  9. The Coyote Teodora

  10. Buried Alive

  11. The Three Gowns

  12. The Horse of Seven Colors

  13. The Cow

  PART TWO

  14. Death and the Doctor

  15. What the Owls Said

  16. Aunt Misery

  17. Palm-tree Story

  18. Pedro de Urdemalas

  I. THE LETTER CARRIER FROM THE OTHER WORLD

  II. THE KING’S PIGS

  III. THE SACK

  IV. PEDRO GOES TO HEAVEN

  19. A Voyage to Eternity

  20. Mother and Daughter

  21. The Bird Sweet Magic

  22. Death Comes as a Rooster

  23. The Twelve Truths of the World

  Folk Prayers

  I. BEFORE RECITING THE ROSARY

  II. FOR THE DECEASED

  III. AGAINST WITCHCRAFT

  IV. TO REMOVE A CURSE

  V. AGAINST ENEMIES

  VI. TO ST. ANTHONY

  PART THREE

  24. The Mouse and the Dung Beetle

  25. The Canon and the King’s False Friend

  26. The Story That Became a Dream

  27. St. Theresa and the Lord

  28. Rice from Ashes

  29. Juan María and Juana María

  30. The Witch Wife

  31. O Wicked World

  32. The Three Sisters

  33. The Count and the Queen

  PART FOUR

  34. Crystal the Wise

  35. Love Like Salt

  36. The Pongo’s Dream

  37. The Fox and the Monkey

  38. The Miser’s Jar

  39. Tup and the Ants

  40. A Master and His Pupil

  41. The Louse-Drum

  42. The Three Dreams

  43. The Clump of Basil

  Riddles

  PART FIVE

  44. The Charcoal Peddler’s Chicken

  45. The Three Counsels

  46. Seven Blind Queens

  47. The Mad King

  48. A Mother’s Curse

  49. The Hermit and the Drunkard

  50. The Noblewoman’s Daughter and the Charcoal Woman’s Son

  51. The Enchanted Cow

  52. Judas’s Ear

  53. Good Is Repaid with Evil

  54. The Fisherman’s Daughter

  PART SIX

  55. In the Beginning

  56. How the First People Were Made

  57. Adam’s Rib

  58. Adam and Eve and Their Children

  59. God’s Letter to Noéh

  60. God Chooses Noah

  61. The Flood

  62. A Prophetic Dream

  63. The White Lily

  64. The Night in the Stable

  65. When Morning Came

  I. WHY DID IT DAWN?

  II. THAT WAS THE PRINCIPAL DAY

  66. Three Kings

  67. The Christ Child as Trickster

  68. Christ Saved by the Firefly

  69. Christ Betrayed by Snails

  70. Christ Betrayed by the Magpie-jay

  71. The Blind Man at the Cross

  72. The Cricket, the Mole, and the Mouse

  73. As If with Wings

  PART SEVEN

  74. Slowpoke Slaughtered Four

  75. The Price of Heaven and the Rain of Caramels

  I.

  II.

  76. Pine Cone the Astrologer

  77. The Dragon Slayer

  78. Johnny-boy

  79. The Rarest Thing

  80. Prince Simpleheart

  81. The Flower of Lily-Lo

  82. My Garden Is Better Than Ever

  83. Juan Bobo and the Pig

  84. The Parrot Prince

  Chain Riddles

  I.

  II.

  III.

  IV.

  V.

  VI.

  PART EIGHT

  85. A Dead Man Speaks

  86. The Bear’s Son

  87. Charity

  88. Riches Without Working

  89. Let Somebody Buy You Who Doesn’t Know You

  90. The Mouse King

  91. Mariquita Grim and Mariquita Fair

  92. The Compadre’s Dinner

  93. The Hog

  94. Two Sisters

  95. The Ghosts’ Reales

  PART NINE

  96. The Bad Compadre

  97. Black Chickens

  98. Doublehead

  99. Littlebit

  100. Rosalie

  101. A Day Laborer Goes to Work

  102. The Moth

  103. The Earth Ate Them

  EPILOGUE - TWENTIETH-CENTURY MYTHS

  104. Why Tobacco Grows Close to Houses

  105. The Buzzard Husband

  106. The Dead Wife

  107. Romi Kumu Makes the World

  108. She Was Thought and Memory

  109. Was It Not an Illusion?

  110. The Beginning Life of the Hummingbird

  111. Ibis Story

  112. The Condor Seeks a Wife

  113. The Priest’s Son Becomes an Eagle

  114. The Revolt of the Utensils

  115. The Origin of Permanent Death

  GLOSSARY OF NATIVE CULTURES

  Acknowledgments

  NOTES

  REGISTER OF TALE TYPES AND SELECTED MOTIFS

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Copyright Page

  PREFACE

  The stories in this book represent the folktale tradition of Spanish-speaking America set within a frame of American Indian lore. As the scheme suggests, Latino folklore is two things at once. For the most part it is distinctly Old World, preserving medieval and even ancient story types. And yet in part it is new. That is, it has been embraced by Indo-America, which retains its own distinctive traditions while contributing a new, mixed lore of European and native elements.

  The one hundred folktales at the core of this collection have been chosen to include the various European genres, ranging from the comic and the anecdotal to the heroic, the moralizing, and the religious. Familiar characters like the trickster Pedro de Urdemalas, the antagonistic two compadres, and the witch wife have been accommodated, as well as such quintessential tale types as The Bear’s Son, Blancaflor, The Three Counsels, and The Clump of Basil. To suggest the atmosphere of live performance, the stories have been sequenced in the form of an idealized velorio, or wake, the most frequent occasion for public storytelling in Latin America. Riddles, games (here exhibited by a genre that will be called “chain riddles”), and of course folk prayers also help pass the time at a wake. Small selections of these are added to the tales.

  Consequently, care has been taken to present material that is oral. In the preface to a book of folktales this should not have to be said. Yet in the region under c
onsideration novelists are also folklorists and the distinction between literature and folklore has often been blurred. It is easy to set aside Valentín García Sáiz’s Leyendas y supersticiones del Uruguay as an artist’s creation rather than the transmission of a teller’s performance, less easy to exclude the Colombian novelist Tomás Carrasquilla’s Cuentos de Tejas Arriba. In the case of the Costa Rican short-story writer, novelist, and political activist Carmen Lyra, the nearly two dozen folktales she recorded have been accepted by folktale scholars, and one of them is included here.

  The greatest debt, however, is to the company of dedicated folklorists and anthropologists that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century and set about the task of recording Latino folklore nation by nation. Manuel J. Andrade, for the Dominican Republic; Delina Anibarro de Halushka, for Bolivia; Paulo Carvalho-Neto, for Ecuador; Susana Chertudi, for Argentina; and Ramón Laval, for Chile, are among the names that should be mentioned. Their publications will be found listed in the bibliography; their endeavors were a kind of systematics, akin to natural history, carefully preserving, labeling, and categorizing specimens of oral literature. Without their painstaking labor a compilation of this kind, which attempts to be panoramic, would not have been possible.

  African-American folklore might well have been taken into account, especially for the Caribbean area—except that it has already been included in another volume in this series, Roger D. Abrahams’s admirable African American Folktales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World. Finally, there are no translations here from the Portuguese-speaking region, though there could have been in view of the overall unity of Ibero-American lore. It can be claimed, though, that the vast territory of Brazil is beyond the scope of the present offering. The folkloric riches of Indo-, Afro-, and Luso-Brazil deserve a volume of their own.

  Timothy Knab, Richard Balkin, and Altie Karper jointly decided that I should undertake this essentially Hispanic volume. I thank them for giving me the opportunity. Barbara Bader provided information at a crucial moment; and I am grateful to Susan DiLorenzo, Jean Su, Rosalie Burgher, Ruth Anne Muller, Mary Hesley, and Jeanne Elliott for aid in locating texts.

  J. B.

  West Shokan, New York

  July 2001

  INTRODUCTION

  Latin American folklore, or more precisely the recording of oral tradition in Latin America, has a five-hundred-year history marked by assiduous and highly skilled endeavor. Its span, however, is not continuous. There are two periods, the early Colonial era, lasting through the sixteenth century and into the first few decades of the seventeenth, and the twentieth century. In between lie nearly three hundred years of inactivity on the part of scribes and archivists, whose missed opportunities, to paraphrase the storyteller’s closing formula, were carried off by the wind.

  Understandably the two periods are not comparable. The first belongs to the era of early colonialism and religious conversion; while the second follows in the trail of two relatively recent phenomena—the rise of social science and the stirrings of romantic nationalism. The different agendas, set by the missionary on one hand and the folklorist on the other, produced results that were dissimilar in subject matter and even in style. This book is concerned mainly with the latter period. Nevertheless, it is in the earlier era, with its lore of the Conquest and of the advent of Christianity, that characteristic themes are first sounded.

  Indian Background

  One might have assumed that the initial voyages of Columbus had more pressing business than the collecting of stories. But in 1496, faced with the challenge of repeated insurrections among the Taino of Hispaniola, the Admiral himself ordered his chaplain, the Jeronymite friar Ramón Pané, to make a careful study of native custom. Pané lived with the Taino for nearly two years, made careful notes, and in his report included fragments of oral lore reduced to alphabetic script. Among the small but choice harvest of motifs were such typical Latin American Indian items as the ocean trapped in a gourd, the origin of women from trees, and the emergence of ancestors from inside the earth.

  Less than two decades after Pané’s discoveries, the royal chronicler Peter Martyr d’Anghiera was at work on a compendium of New World exploration that included a pioneering sample of the lore of the northwest corner of South America. From Peter Martyr comes the first notice of the typical Colombian Indian motif of the female supreme deity.

  Collecting in depth, however, did not occur until after the conquest of the Aztec capital, Mexico, in 1521. Franciscan friars, who began arriving in Mexico City three years later, took charge of the intellectual culture of the new colony and made it their business to learn Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs. The friars prepared Nahuatl-Spanish grammars and dictionaries that are still useful today, along with voluminous compilations of Nahuatl texts. Foremost in this work was the missionary-ethnographer Bernardino de Sahagún (1499–1590), whose twelve-book encyclopedia of Nahua lore, called General History of the Things of New Spain, included myths, legends, oratory, songs, sayings, and figures of speech. Repeatedly comparing himself to a medical doctor, Sahagún explained that he was recording these texts to supply preachers with the necessary information to “cure” the native people of their “blindness,” because “the physician cannot properly treat the patient without knowing in which of the [four] humors, and from which cause, the infirmity arises.” It is clear, nevertheless, that Sahagún was a man not only of the faith but of the Renaissance, whose researches served the interests of science, perhaps intentionally. In retrospect, Sahagún has been viewed as an experimenter in the techniques that would one day reemerge as anthropology.

  Similar efforts, though not with the same thoroughness or subtlety, were initiated in the central Andes about 1550, gathering momentum in the 1570s during the term of the fourth viceroy of Peru, Francisco de Toledo. In order to support a program of reform and to substantiate his claim that Inca rule had been abusive, Toledo ordered an investigation of Inca history and custom, much as Columbus had done in Hispaniola three generations earlier. One result was Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa’s colorful Historia de los incas, drawn from the traditional histories chanted by Quechua bards.

  The native chronicles to a large extent are the stories of kings, presented in chronological order, preceded by legends of tribal origin and myths of world creation. This is true of the sixteenth-century lore from Peru, Mexico, and elsewhere, including Colombia and Guatemala. Even in the fragmentary accounts obtained in Hispaniola, the names of a few Taino chieftains are preserved. Of particular interest, especially in the Peruvian and Mexican cycles, are stories of the final kings, the ones who were obliged to deal with the Conquest. In the view of native storytellers these rulers are tragic figures, and we hear that the Conquest was fated to occur. Such stories, from Mexico and Peru, are included as nos. 1/I–V and 2/III–V in this anthology.

  It could be imagined that when the collectors of oral lore reawakened in the twentieth century and began finding the standard repertory of European folktales with their poor-boy-wins-princess plots and ubiquitous kings, the versions recorded in Indian communities would incorporate kings in Indian dress. But what we learn, in many localities, is that the Indian king has gone underground. In native folk belief, as if harking back to the Conquest lore of the old chronicles, the “king” is a remote personage who has been captured, killed, or hidden inside the earth, eventually to be reborn or to emerge as a deliverer. In the Andes this important figure is called Inkarrí, combining Inca and the Spanish word rey, or king. In the region from New Mexico to Panama he is sometimes called “Montezuma,” evidently in allusion to the Montezuma of Aztec history. Among the Boruca of Costa Rica he is supposed to be living inside a mountain, guarding a treasure hoard. The widespread attitude is summed up by the anthropologist Robert Laughlin, writing of his experience with an accomplished tale-teller, Romin Teratol, of the Tzotzil Maya community of Zinacantán: “That Zinacantecs do not see kings in the same light as we do was driven home to me when showing pict
ures of contemporary European kings and queens to Romin. He asked if they were immortal. Not satisfied with my negative reply, he persisted, ‘But they come from caves, don’t they?’ ”

  Meanwhile the familiar king of Old World folktales, in many of the versions composed by Indian storytellers, has been changed into the hacienda owner, or patrón, a character decidedly less persuadable than the prototype. Immediately the tales take on the coloration of modern short stories with sociological overtones. In short, reality breaks through. “The Pongo’s Dream” (no. 36), from Peru, and “The Bad Compadre” (no. 96), from Guatemala, are two of several examples in the collection at hand.

  At what date Hispanic folktales—the Cinderellas and the Dragon Slayers—arrived on American shores would be hard to calculate. Although modern folklorists have assumed these stories came with the conquerors, direct evidence is scanty. We do know that a group of forty-seven Aesop’s fables was translated into Nahuatl in the sixteenth century, and such fables recur in modern Latin American collections. One of them, though it is not represented in the Nahuatl group, is given here as no. 53, “Good Is Repaid with Evil.” A better example, representing a different kind of folktale, is no. 15, “What the Owls Said,” a story from twentieth-century Mexico with a Peruvian variant recorded in 1608.

  More important, it is clear that the earliest missionaries brought Bible stories, at least in the orthodox versions found in the various forms of the catechism known as doctrina cristiana, as well as in sermons and in other writings, all of which were translated into native languages. Often the stories are given in a connected series beginning with the creation of the world, followed by the appearance of Adam and Eve, the expulsion from paradise, God’s visit to Noah, the world flood, the birth of Christ, the crucifixion, and the resurrection. By no means a Bible miscellany, the sequence economically illustrates the Catholic doctrine of original sin and redemption. That is, God created humans to enjoy eternal life in exchange for obedience; Adam and Eve, through their disobedience, broke the contract and bequeathed their sin to all subsequent generations. The flood was an attempt to wash away the accumulated sin, though only to temporary effect; it was Christ, finally, through his life, death, and resurrection, who restored the promise that had been withdrawn at the Expulsion. The earliest known native version, dating from 1565, is given here as no. 3, “Bringing Out the Holy Word.” When the cycle reappears in the twentieth century it is found to contain numerous nonscriptural details, evidently borrowed from medieval traditions of considerable rarity in world folklore today. Indeed, the cycle has dropped out of the Hispanic repertory, surviving only in Indian retellings; it is one of the characteristic jewels of Latin American folklore, presented here in its twentieth-century form as nos. 55–73. Not surprisingly, it has been reinterpreted by native tellers. The doctrinal cues are now largely missing, and—again with sociological overtones—the emphasis is on escape from persecution.